A chronicle of our life in Brugge...
"Close to the region where the Champagne grapes grow, the land is also golden
with barley; France begins to sound Flemish, and blends into Belgium; the wine nations
yield to the beer lands.....the respect and the ceremony that other nations reserve for wine,
the Belgians also accord, with a special flourish, to beer." - Jackson

Friday, September 2, 2011

Picasso Exhibition

"Give me a museum and I'll fill it" - Pablo Picasso

After we went to the Dali exhibition we visited the Pablo Picasso exhibition, featuring other artists such as Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Georges Braque and Joan Miró.

It is a permament exhibition based at the Oud Sint-Jan hospital. It is an interesting building connected by bridges and offering great views of the area including the Church Of Our Lady.

There are about 150 engravings, drawings, lithographs, and ceramics showing the artisic evolution of Picasso.

Picasso's first Dove of Peace was chosen as the emblem for the First International Peace Conference in Paris in 1949. It was a picture of a pigeon which had been given to him by his great friend and rival, the French artist Henri Matisse.

There is also a temporary exhibition at the site showing work by Henri Matisse.

We didn't see much of Miro's work in the exhibition, but we found prints in the shop.

Overall a very good exhibition. There were lots of explanations of the artists' lives, and their influences. Whilst the two exhibitions (Dali and Picasso) were very different, we found the Dali to be more inspiring. You could stand and stare at a Dali for a while and keep coming back to it after having seen another piece and it would cast a new light on the image. Whereas with Picasso, you could clearly see a development within his artisitic life and the image you were looking at seemed to summarise that era.